There are several ways that a requester can solicit help from a group of listeners today. He could use e-mail to send a request to a predetermined group of listeners who could each make a decision whether to engage in e-mail conversation with the requester. The problem is that e-mail's persist and have an indeterminate turn around, thus a listener may happen to see the requesters e-mail “immediately” but another listener may see the e-mail hours (or months) later. Conversing by e-mail would be very frustrating. The requester may enter a chat room to make his request, the problem is that all the members of the chat room are peers so it would be difficult to assure that listeners were interested enough to engage in conversation on a requesters subject and even if they were, the chat room would be cluttered with many users messages pertaining to many subjects all interspersed. The requester could open an instant message (IM) session with one listener at a time but he'd have to know which listener to direct the request to and wait a period for response to the listener to decide that the listener wasn't responding. Prior art methods often require the requester know the ID of the members of the community, know their interest and skills, share conversation with other requesters, take a long time to negotiate to find the appropriate listener, allow only one to one communication and the like.
FIG. 1 depicts the elements that make up a typical computer for use in networked applications. The computer 100 consists of a Base Computer 101 which comprises a processor 106, storage media such as a magnetic disk 107 and a high speed volatile main memory 105. An operating system and application programs 111 reside on the storage media 107 and are paged into main memory 105 as needed for computations performed by the processor 106. The Base computer may include optional peripheral devices including a video display 102, a printer or scanner 110, a keyboard 104, a pointing device (mouse) 103 and a connection 108 to a network 109. In a client environment, a user will interact with a (Graphical User Interface) GUI by use of a keyboard 104 and mouse 103 in conjunction with the display of information on the display 102 under control of an application program (application 1) 112. The client application program 112 will then interact with remote users by way of the network 109.
In FIG. 2 an example Internet system is shown. A user at client 1 201 uses applications on his system. This user (user 1 210) at client 1 201 can interact with clients 2-4 202-204 by way of a client server computer 206. Applications 112 may be provided by each client 201-205 and or the client server 206 or some remote server 208 by way of the network 207. The user at client 1 201 can interact with a remote user (user 5 211) at client 5 205 by way of the Internet 207.
Networked clients comprise applications for communication. E-mail applications provide for sending a message to a mail server that then makes the recipient aware of the waiting message. The recipient then can elect to open the message and view it at his client machine. E-mail messages can be sent to a single recipient or can contain a list of several recipients (one to many). One to many e-mail transactions are popular with advertisers and the use of one to many e-mails has been dubbed “SPAM-ing”. Recently Instant Messaging (IM) has gained popularity in the form of sending text messages directly to another client. A first user composes an IM and selects a second user as the target. A message is then sent directly to the second user and appears on his display as either a message or the notification of a message. IMs are typically one to one messages.
A pub/sub service 304 receives messages originating from a content service and delivers them to client subscribers. An example message published includes a topic string, a set of property name-value pairs, and a body. A subscriber identifies a topic string pattern and properties tests and receives matching messages according to a standard, for instance JAVA Message Service (JMS).
The World Wide Web (The Web) is a popular computer networking platform today with millions of people daily using it for a wide variety of applications from personal e-mail and research “web surfing” to highly sophisticated business and scientific uses. The web was developed to make use of the Internet simple and easy to use. The concept was to provide Browser programs at user (client) personal computers (PCs) to interpret information from host servers using HTML and graphic files. The Internet provided the communication means to interconnect web clients and servers.
Personal computers rely upon an operating system to perform fundamental operations. Operating systems provide the minimum program function necessary for other computer code to run on a computer. Operating systems might manage access to hardware or offer a graphical environment that applications can leverage. Some operating systems provide windowing toolkits providing native access to the basic widgets making up the windowing environment. A widget might be a window decoration or a button. The widget has a certain appearance and behavior defined by the windowing environment. Programs that leverage this toolkit inherit these foundations.
An important part of windowing environment is the ability to present a dialog to an end user notifying (alerting) them of an event. The event might be a simple notification or offer limited choices such as Yes, No, Okay or Cancel. Dialog boxes offer a simple means to allow programs to communicate with end users.
Web pages provide a means for presenting content. Web applications allow for richer content organization and specific functions and features. Either a windowing environment or a Web application provides a means to notify an end user of a message. If the Web application chooses to use a window, it will be using the native windowing environment on which the browser client application is running or a windowing environment of a downloaded piece of code. These downloaded pieces of code are often known as applets. Applets are applications that can be embedded in web markup.
Email has become the method for one user or agent of a system to send a persistent asynchronous message to another user or agent of the system. Email has become the choice medium for direct marketing efforts and general advertising. Email alerts are email messages that a given event or news has occurred. Some examples of events causing Email alerts are:
A stock has hit a high or low.
A shipment has reached its destination.
A news event on a given topic has occurred.
For the end user to receive alerts destined for their address, the user must check (poll) their email account for notification. Their response is limited to hyper linking and replying via email message. Replies are usually structured and used to unsubscribe to the alerting mechanism. Anyone can send email to anyone that can receive.
With the advent of pagers and now mobile telephones and like devices, text messaging has become a common form of alert notification. Messages sent to a pager or Simple Messaging Service (SMS) capable device function based on the push model. Messages are tagged as destined for a given device id and then routed to that device. Response can take the form of another text message. Pagers and phones can light up and vibrate indicating the arrival of an alert message. With the advent of media on phones, sound, video and images can be sent along with the text messages. Anyone can send a page or SMS.
Instant messaging (IM) is a method for one user or agent of a system to send a synchronous message to another user or agent of the system. A common IM system is AMERICA ON LINE (AOL) Instant Messenger and other AOL like clients provide web based customized alerts. The alerting is essentially a web page in a window or a web browser pop up with content specified by the user. User experiences and actions performed are those found in a normal web browser environment. AOL application programs are the only creator of alerts on the AOL system. End users or agents can not send AOL alerts to other end users or agents. In other systems, business partners are allowed to engage in broadcasts.